Issue #95

September 17 2015

Editor Picks

Intelligent machines: Making AI work in the real worldAs part of the BBC's Intelligent Machines season, Google's Eric Schmidt has penned an exclusive article on how he sees artificial intelligence developing, why it is experiencing such a renaissance and where it will go next...

Data Science Articles & Videos

Sharks, Landsharks, Geoplotting, and KDTrees!So now with the end of summer officially here (at least in the northern hemisphere), we thought it would be interesting to dig into some shark attack data. In this post, we'll look through the Global Shark Attack File, checkout some of the characteristics of shark attacks and then dive in to some geo-plotting with Matplotlib Basemap...

Letting Users Choose Recommender Algorithms: An Experimental StudyAs one way of taking advantage of the relative merits of different algorithms, we gave users the ability to change the algorithm providing their movie recommendations and studied how they make use of this power... We examine log data from user interactions with this new feature to understand whether and how users switch among recommender algorithms, and select a final algorithm to use...

Machine Learning Trick of the Day: Hutchinson's TrickHutchinson's estimator is a simple way to obtain a stochastic estimate of the trace of a matrix. This is a simple trick that uses randomisation to transform the algebraic problem of computing the trace into the statistical problem of computing an expectation of a quadratic function...

Forget Dark Energy: MIT Physicists Have Finally Cracked Overhand Knots
In a study recently accepted for publication in the Physical Review Letters, engineers at MIT and Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris offer a new fundamental theory of knots based on relationships between topology, the mathematics of spatial relationships, and the basic mechanics of friction and pliability...

Jobs

At Trunk Club, we develop services that help our employees make data-driven decisions, from stylists to merchandising. Every team at Trunk Club relies on the data we collect about our customers and how we interact with them to make meaningful decisions. Our tool chain strives to make it easy and painless to turn an algorithm into an API or run A/B tests using multivariate models. Our work drives Trunk Club - we enable the entire company to iterate faster and help accelerate business growth. You will have visibility into every team and be connected directly to executives without bureaucracy...

Training & Resources

Cheatsheet – Python & R codes for common Machine Learning AlgorithmsHere’s a collection of 10 most commonly used machine learning algorithms with their codes in Python and R. Considering the rising usage of machine learning in building models, this cheat sheet is good to act as a code guide to help you bring these machine learning algorithms to use...

Books

"This is the best general-readership book on applied statistics that I've read. Short review: if you're interested in science, economics, or prediction: read it. It's full of interesting cases, builds intuition, and is a readable example of Bayesian thinking."